


just troubled

by mymphr



Category: Elementary (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Depression, Gen, Mental Health Issues, Possible references to self harm, References to Addiction, References to Drugs, References to Suicide
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-07-14
Updated: 2015-01-31
Packaged: 2018-02-08 21:24:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1956666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mymphr/pseuds/mymphr
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock has struggled with mental health issues and depression for a long time. Just because he has a friend doesn't mean it's stopped - only that he sometimes has someone to help him deal with it. </p><p>please read the warnings - if you are triggered by references to self harm, suicide, or drugs, please don't read this. not sure whether it will get graphic at this point, but will put trigger warnings at the start of each chapter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Slump

**Author's Note:**

> sherlock's canonical neurodivergence and depression in elementary have been really important to me since i started watching. we do see some of it in the show, but i kind of wanted to expand and show him suffering from depression like i and an awful lot of other people do, so. i am writing this. 
> 
> this chapter isn't particularly graphic, but contains some description of and reference to suicide, talk of drugs, and obviously depression.

-

Deliriously dull. Fantastically, infamously, undeniably, unreasonably, contagiously, unfortunately, painfully, distastefully… something. A loud puff of air - filled with bitterness and boredom and anger - forced itself from his lungs as Sherlock flipped over on the couch in some half-arsed attempt to wake himself from the unbearable, immovable, impossible, unreasonable slump he was stuck in.

 

What was the word he was searching for? Did it exist? Every word but the one which described the feeling deep in his gut, nibbling at his lower intestine and tugging on his stomach, seemed to come to mind. His nimble fingers plucked at the frayed corners of the fabric on the couch, tiny strings coming apart and making barely audible yet wonderfully satisfying tearing sounds. Had he eaten today? Joan left the house before he’d woken up - the days where he slept at somewhat normal hours, she tended to let him. Wouldn’t wake him for breakfast, especially if it had been a few days since he’d properly slept.

 

What time was it? It was more effort than he could muster to find out - and, frankly, he didn’t care much. If he hadn’t eaten yet, it was too late now to force himself from the sofa only to make some shitty meal that he might not even get through.

 

He laughed at himself. Only a small scoff, muffled by the (slightly spit covered - he’d been drifting in and out of sleep for a while) material of the couch. This was precisely what he’d once used the Forbidden Needle - he pulled a face - to destroy. Precisely what they tried to medicate him for, in that dastardly, dreaded, doomed, darn...damnable? hospital. Hospital? It probably didn’t count. He didn’t count it. Not that it mattered. Very little did.

 

Regardless, how they thought they could medicate away something as meaningless, as abstract, as the realisation that everything was just shit was foolish. The realisation was just that, a realisation, and nothing more. It wasn’t going to drive him back to drugs. Not now. Not with his pride more intact than it had been for a long time and Joan Watson still within 30 miles of him. Whether or not his pride remained large enough a barrier to what rested perpetually in the back of his skull was a different and entirely meaningless matter, with the bond they’d somehow formed. Joan would probably smell it from across the city if he made any attempt to obtain anything vaguely intoxicating.

 

He punched the floor. Softly, at first, then again, harder, and again, and again, and again, until it made him wince and he saw the things on the mantelpiece shaking and threatening to fall. He shook with them, a sudden anger running through his blood at the way he was acting. Pathetic, pitiful, piss-poor, shit, shit, shit, just bloody fucking shit. With a clench of his fists he stood, jaw tensed in frustration and ready to scream. Almost the moment he stood up, fire in his heart, something put it out. He slumped back down onto the floor, back against the couch, head in his shaking hands.

What exactly did he plan to do? Kill himself? Was that what he was going to do? Sherlock Holmes, renowned detective, brother, colleague, somehow friend, and he was going to - what, get a kitchen knife and cut his own throat? Was that even fucking possible?

 

He slumped forward on the floor, letting his forehead thump against the floor. This was what they’d call an illness, where he once was. This is what they did, quite happily, call an illness. This was what he blankly refused to let them medicate. Sometimes he wondered why. It hurt, and now, now he’d made a real life, had people who cared and who he cared about and reasons to go on - though he didn’t like thinking about that too hard because he knew he’d pick them apart and decide there wasn’t really a reason to go on - he couldn’t afford to lose it. He couldn’t afford to relapse, or to break and hurt himself or… He didn’t know. He was… something. Something he couldn’t identify or find a word for, but something that made him scared to ask for help, even though his stomach was clenching inside him and his head was screaming and his throat was closing, and he was scared not asking for help, too.

 

He punched the floor, again, but it lacked the fire he no longer felt in his chest.

 

This was when he felt most afraid. When his mind was determined to work only against him, only in favour of self-destruction and relapse and death. He couldn’t solve cases like this. He couldn’t do anything like this. His mind wouldn’t focus on anything worth focusing on for long. He couldn’t focus on the things that stopped him feeling like this.

 

Suicide didn’t occur to him all that often, anymore, but when it did it was vivid, technicolour, screaming out in surround sound, whispering into every part of him, every sense and pore and brain cell. It was frightening. He wished he could find a better word for it. It was so much more than frightening, but that was the best way he could describe it. He wished he could know if and when it would either leave him alone or get it over with and kill him. He wished Joan was home, even though he knew he wouldn’t talk to her. He wished a lot of things, and not a single one of them made sense.

 


	2. Guilt

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He didn't relapse.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> very short, more of a snippet of a story than a chapter in itself, but i felt like i needed to post something to show that i still care about this fic. writing is just really hard and every time i come up with an idea it takes me 300 years to actually form it into anything, so.
> 
> big trigger warnings for drugs and relapsing

It wasn’t the first time he’d woken up in a hospital, head heavy and light at the same time, muscles sore, mouth dry. It was, though, the first time he knew for certain it wasn’t his fault he was there. Well, no - that wasn’t entirely true, but not his fault in quite the same way as usual.

 

He forced his eyes to open, blinking hard against the characteristically harsh lights, face twisting with effort and pain and anger. Joan was, of course, there. Of course. Of course. She took a breath when Sherlock opened his eyes, resting her hand against the mattress he lay on, waiting to see if he’d talk first. He wouldn’t. 

“Sherlock. You’re awake,” she stated, eliciting an eyeroll (behind recently re-closed eyelids) from Sherlock. He merely nodded. “How are you feeling?”

 

He was silent.

 

“Yeah. I thought so. Look, I know you probably don’t want to talk about it right now, but whenever you’re ready we can talk about this. About whatever happened, and how you feel, and-”

 

“You have it wrong,” He said, voice so gravelly it felt almost like it scratched the air it tumbled into.

 

Joan furrowed her brow.

 

“What?”

 

“You have it wrong. You think you know what happened,” he breathed a heavy sigh, “But you don’t. I didn’t relapse.” He could practically see her pitiful expression, the utter lack of belief behind her eyes.

 

“Sherlock, it’s okay-”

 

“I didn’t _relapse._ ” he hissed, teeth gritted and fists curled. Joan leaned back in her seat, sighing.

 

“So tell me what you did do.”

 

“I was careless. Foolish. Frankly, a bad detective -” he didn’t let her scoff interrupt him, at this “- and I regret it. But I didn’t relapse. I was kidnapped, and framed, and…” he trailed off, swallowing hard. His memories of what had happened were hazy at best, and non-existent at worst. His head hurt, and there was a lump in his throat that felt like it might crack him open, and a void in his stomach that told him the moment he was alone Bad Thoughts would hit him at full speed.

 

“I understand.” She spoke, hand resting on his upper arm. She did. He knew she did. She always did. He never had to say much. She’d find out what had happened, most likely. She was a good detective. Better than him, no doubt. She had… humanity, and consistent soberness, and _normality_ on her side.

  
He was glad he had her on _his_ side. 


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> sometimes it's nice to feel a little less real

Blood burned through veins, each pump of the heart jolting the rest of the slab of meat it was housed inside, muscles stinging and eyes watering and head spinning until it felt like the walls were sliding away and melting around the small human frame living inside of them,

 

Lungs threatening to give up, Sherlock let himself fall to the ground. The sun was not yet up, but that meant little in winter; people outside were walking, business-like and meaningful, to taxis and cars and subway stations. He let his unfocused eyes close for a second. Whatever time it was, he hadn’t slept for what Joan would tell him was an absurd amount of time, a worrying amount of time, a stupid amount of time. He’d been doing push ups. That, too, she would call absurd and worrying and stupid, but enough push ups made the things around him feel a little less solid, a little less entrapping, and he liked it that way. Enough push ups made his bones feel solid inside his flesh, but the things outside of it feel like they would give way if he touched them. Combined with enough caffeine, at least. 

He called it inducing dissociation to himself. He’d never really needed to give it a name, but it was something he liked to do with near everything. Labels made him feel safe, when he gave them to himself. Not so much when others did it for him. Should anyone ever see him like this, at 7am, melting into the ground with sweat soaking his skin and the rug, he would tell them he was inducing dissociation, and they would leave him alone, because labels made other people feel safe, too. Especially when Sherlock said them, with enough authority. 

Joan had a tendency to break that rule, which made Sherlock slightly uncomfortable. Some part of his brain, though, liked it. Liked that she cared enough to ignore his words and look at him. She knew him well enough to know that just because he put a label on something, it didn’t mean it was good for him, or that he knew what he was doing. Should she catch him doing this, she might be confused. Not that it would make much change.

She had, in fact, seen him dissociate before, though she might not have been aware. He was never sure. He didn’t ever mean for it to happen when she was around. It just did. It wasn’t quite so relaxing an experience (though relaxing was never the right word, he couldn’t ever find an appropriate one for the feeling of sinking down through the carpet and into the earth) when he had no control over it. When he was feeling bad and took a case and it happened. It was different, then, when he had no control. 

There were times when he’d been talking to Joan, and he didn’t know what he was saying. He was talking, his mouth was moving, but his brain was not telling it what to say or how to say it. Or, at least, he didn’t think it was. It was hard to tell. It was like his body was continuing ahead of him, and his brain had paused. The world kept going, but his brain had stopped. He remembered trying to explain it once, a long time ago, when someone asked why he kept spacing out when they were talking to him. It had been just as difficult then, and he’d never found a way to explain.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i know, this is becoming a self indulgent character study. well. this has always been a self indulgent character study, but now i'm admitting it. i think chapters are mostly just going to be short internal monologues basically, now. i just like getting a feel of sherlock, and the way he would handle these things.   
> i also never update ever, so i apologise if people want me to and i don't. writing is hard, college happens a lot, and i have a million mental health problems that get in the way of basic functioning. so, apologies. thanks for reading if you have <3


	4. a different kind of different

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Not everything different about him is inherently bad.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> autistic sherlock is deeply important to me and essentially 100% canon, so i finally buckled and wrote this. was going to make it its own thing but i feel like i need to add more to this, so. maybe let me know if you want more autistic sherlock, because i am 500% willing to write more, especially because i feel like i can write autistic sherlock whenever, whereas i can only write him with his various mental illnesses when i feel terrible. 
> 
> not a mental illness, but a mental difference. autism is not Bad, it just sometimes feels bad. (sidenote: i am autistic)

The question alarmed him. 

 

Interviews were second nature now; he could drift away in his head whilst interviewing, if he wanted to (he rarely wanted to, interviews were crucial and interesting most of the time, but the occasional interview with a total fool irrelevant to the case was necessary). 

 

He was last to walk to the door, Bell in front of him, Sherlock’s hand on the door handle, ready to close it and leave their interviewee briefly. 

 

“Mr. Holmes, before you go, can I just - are you autistic?”

 

He hesitated immediately, eyes stuck to the doorframe. His head lifted, body taking its usual open yet somehow equally defensive stance; chin up, fists clenched at his sides, back straight. It took a moment before he nodded at Bell in front of him - who had paused, wondering what Sherlock was doing - to go ahead without him. 

 

Door drifting shut beside him, he stepped back into the room. 

 

“What?” he said, soft and quiet, face near expressionless bar a slight tension between his eyebrows. His jaw was clenched, mouth tight and still. 

 

“It’s - it doesn’t matter, it’s fine. I didn’t mean to offend you or whatever. Sorry. You can go.” The interviewee - Chris, Sherlock believed her name was - waved a hand, eyes fixed on the table and a nervous smile on her lips. 

 

Sherlock promptly changed his facial expression. Eyebrows raised, mouth less tight, less tense; his body more open, less aggressive body language. Small things he’d taught himself to do over the years, to seem more approachable or simply less aggressive. 

 

“No. No. I’m not - I wasn’t offended. I simply haven’t been asked that for a long time.” 

 

“But you have been asked?” 

 

He shrugged vaguely, looking away. “Many times. People simply tend to assume my behaviours are other things, nowadays.” Remnants of addiction, depression, psychosis, just being a dick. There was always something else people had reason to assume. 

 

Bottom lip between his teeth (bad habit, Joan’s voice whispered in the back of his mind), he pulled back the chair he’d been sat on earlier, sitting back down. 

 

“Why do /you/ ask?”

 

Chris laughed a little, hands wrapped around each other on the table, eyes focused intently on a button on Sherlock’s jacket that was starting to come loose. 

 

“I would consider it obvious. Your mannerisms - if you don’t mind me saying so - are blatantly autistic. The… the way you hold yourself, your expressions. The way you seem to script out your sentences before you say them - you make sure you know what you’re saying, and that you say it in a very particular way. This -“ she gestured to the building around her, the files on the desk, herself, “- is clearly an intense special interest of yours. You seem passionate. And, well. I saw the way you talked with the others. You - you’re not… not awkward, exactly, but it’s different. Different from them. You don’t look them in the eye when you talk. You stare at the ground, or at their chin, while you quick-fire your part of the conversation, then you give them a gap to speak. There are so many things.” 

 

Sherlock’s face was unreadable. His thumbs rubbed against his fingers, the toes of his shoes tapping against each other absently. 

 

He nodded quickly, mouth skewing on his face. 

 

“Thank you.” He uttered.

 

“Thank you?” Chris echoed, head tilted.

 

“Yes. Yes. Thank you. I…” he sighed. “Are you autistic?”

 

She nodded, a flush clear across her cheeks and creeping up to her forehead, an obvious sign that others had asked and reacted badly to her answer in the past. 

 

“I never knew what was wrong with me, when I was younger,” Sherlock began, fists clenched on the table mirroring Chris’ entirely unintentionally. “I know, now, that ‘wrong’ isn't the right word, but years of being asked that very question make one somewhat unable to believe it isn’t true.”

 

Chris nodded knowingly, expression a little bitter. 

 

“I tried everything to fix myself. Bits and pieces of therapy, self harm, a million things supposed to fix me that only made things worse. So I focused on the things that I found deeply interesting - the things that were all I could think about - and tried to forget that I was strange.” 

 

He paused. So many dark times in his life had been caused by the realisation that he was not like anybody else. It hurt. 

 

“But I couldn’t forget forever. People reminded me constantly, and it… it didn’t feel good. So I started researching. The internet is a wonderful place, and one of the most promising things I found was autism. My understanding of the spectrum, until then, had been the media’s representation of non-verbal children, seen as victims or burdens. I did not realise how intrinsically autistic so many of my characteristics were, or that there was an entire community who understood so much more about me than I ever believed possible.”

 

Chris was smiling at him warmly. He smiled loosely back. 

 

“I’m glad you found us.” She said, eyes on his nose.

 

“Me too.” He sighed, pulling at a loose thread on his trousers. 


	5. glass

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There are no other problems, he told her (he told himself). Sometimes I am sad, there are no other problems. Often, I am not sad. It is not a problem.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> huuuge suicide tw for this chapter, please do not read if you will be triggered by that. also self harm and drugs.

 

There are no other problems, he told her (he told himself). Sometimes I am sad, there are no other problems. Often, I am not sad. It is not a problem. 

 

She did not believe him, but she had other patients, other work, patients who came screaming to her with blood pouring from self-inflicted wounds and eyes wide with opiates and fear. She did not have time to acknowledge that she did not believe him. 

 

This was the mistake he made over and over, to his detriment. Some small part of him, some small part which he refused to give attention, cried out for help. It hoped, wished, prayed, that when he said ‘there is no problem’ somebody would say ’yes there is’. And sometimes it almost worked, the thought almost made it into the other person’s head, but all too often the rest of him overpowered this small part. Of course, if somebody is told five times in under ten minutes ‘I am fine,’ with a smile and a nod, they will stop asking if everything is okay. Of course, if someone is told ‘Stop prying,’ they will stop prying. And yet. And yet, _and yet_ , he wondered why no one was helping. He told them not to help, yet when they did not, he told himself they did not care. That he was not wanted. That is why no one helps, he would whisper, no one helps because no one wants you, no one helps because even professionals don’t think you’re worth it,

 

(because you’re pathetic and childish and _ugly_ , because the world doesn’t need pathetic and childish and ugly, you’re an addict at heart and a mean spirit in your head; your tears are only to guilt-trip - though you never cry when someone can see you - and the research you sit up doing at night is only to convince others you have illnesses you do not - though you never tell anyone you research it - and if the world knew you, _really_ knew you, it would tie you to a tree and throw rocks until your heart beat no more; because the bitter words you were told first by children, then parents, then siblings, then friends, then yourself, will keep echoing around your head until you die; because those words and true and those words want to kill you) 

 

He took a breath. His eyes had not been closed, but he felt they had just opened. He swallowed. 

 

The room was nearly bare, bar a few pieces of mismatched furniture, and a wallpaper made up of photos, letters, and masking tape. He tasted blood, but he did not remember bleeding. A finger to his chin told him he’d been biting his lip again. 

 

He blinked. 

 

In the time it took for him to blink, he decided he had to kill himself. He had decided this eight times over the last 5 days. Some of these times had been forgotten, thanks to another train of thought or sleep or drugs. Some of them had been taken care of with the idea that he should do much worse than kill himself, that he deserved much worse than mere death. Some of them had simply been laid aside, in favour of planning it out more extensively than an impulse would allow. 

 

He was sure this time would not be one of those times. 

 

His hands did not feel like they were shaking, but the glass of water he tried to drink slipped from his fingers. The resulting mess infuriated him. Somehow, this was the climax of all the bad things he’d ever done. Somehow, this smashed glass on the floor, this glass which had cost less than a pound and meant nothing to anyone - this was the worst thing he’d ever done. Tears were falling from his eyes, hot and angry, and this angered him further. Hands that did not feel like his own grabbed every glass he could see, launching them at walls and floors and furniture. Noises came from his mouth in a voice he did not recognise, salt stinging his lip as the tears he resented shedding rolled down his face. 

 

Some small shard of him was afraid. A fragment that recognised how much danger he was in. That he should not have pushed everyone away; that, perhaps, he had not, that he still had hope and a future and something left other than anger and fear. 

 

But that small shard was not enough to save him. Fear did not equal protection. 

 

The next time he became fully aware of what he was doing, blood was leaking from in between his fingers, tiny speckles of glass embedded in his fingers. Three larger pieces of broken glass were squeezed tight in each palm, cutting through his skin like scissors through paper. He was not crying, anymore, not really, but tears were still falling. His body was still rocking as though he were sobbing, but he was not. The noises jumping from his throat sounded like shouts and sobs and sadness and rage, but they were not. 

 

There was blood all over him now, staining the socks and boxers he’d been wearing for six days, 

 

(and the skin he’d been wearing for as long as he could remember, but not much longer if he did this one thing, this _one fucking thing_ right)

 

He dropped the glass. Glass could not kill him, not without a great deal of mess and pain and fuss. 

 

 

This was the problem with trying to kill himself on impulse. Logically,

 

(logically, killing himself _logically_ ; there was no such thing, for the Sherlock that resided in his head before this took over would have known that, logically, he would not want to kill himself, that logically he did not deserve pain and hell and death; _logically_ he would take himself to a hospital and beg for help)

 

he would have planned it out, selected a date, obtained a gun or drugs or a rope. But now, on impulse, he did not think straight. He thought only of an immediate death, of something quick and easy and accessible. He shot up as fast as he could with bleeding, shaking hands. This helped.

 

(helped was the wrong word but he did not know what else he was without heroin in his system, high felt like his natural state of being now and sobriety was surely, surely worse)

 

It was perfect, it was _fucking perfect_ and it was ruined. There was a truck, one of the big ones with the lights and the wheels and the dick-head drivers, going too fast down the road, the driver not paying enough attention, with a little more alcohol in his system than he should have had. It was fucking perfect. 

 

At first, for seconds, he thought it had hit him. He thought that he’d stepped into the road and it had hit him, and he was dying and it was okay and he was dying and it was okay. But it quickly became apparent that he was still very much alive. With gravel rash and a possible concussion and drifting in and out of reality, he was very much still alive. This was when he began to cry properly. Without denying it to himself, or stopping it, or repressing it. Tears fell for what felt like the hundredth time in an hour, mouth open and cracking his lip again, blood mixing with spit and tears. It did not take long for him to be sick on the pavement, a mixture of too much heroin and too much crying emptying his stomach. 

 

If he was paying attention, he would have heard the things people around him were thinking. The real things, the most important things. He had become far too good at filtering out other people’s good thoughts about him, and only hearing the bad ones. He was always _looking_ for the bad thoughts. He could hear them, now,

 

(‘he must be mad’ ‘his parents must have beat him’ ‘maybe they should have let him go’ ‘i hope the driver is okay’ ‘that man scares me’ ‘i hope i don’t ever end up like him’)

 

but this was not the whole truth.

 

(‘i hope he gets proper help’ ‘i’ve been there too’ ‘i hope he knows he’s not alone’ ‘whatever he’s done he does not deserve that’ ‘please god help him get better’)

 

Someone had called an ambulance, and he resented it. He wished he could stay crumpled on the pavement in his blood and spit and sick and tears until he mustered the energy to try again, he wished  they would not try to help him, he wished he was not about to be forced off heroin and told he was broken. But he did not fight, not really. He let his body fall slack when they tried to take him, and he did not say a word except for garbled shouts when he cried. He did not co-operate, but he did not fight, because that shard inside of him that was afraid and still loved him tried again and again to take over. It did not succeed, but it stopped him completing the process of falling apart. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i was gonna put this in my other elementary series but that barely anyone reads but i'm proud of this and want people to see it. 
> 
> again, thank you for reading, and sorry i update so little. mental illness, low spoons, the fact i can only write this when i'm low, etc.


End file.
